This pair of yellow-spotted Amazon river turtles were waiting for something at Pana‘ewa Rainforest Zoo & Gardens. Perhaps they were plotting a breakout, figuring out how to cut through the mesh, before making a plod for it.
For more information about Pana‘ewa Rainforest Zoo & Gardens, go to hilozoo.org.
I saw my first lizardfish just a few weeks ago, noticing unusual marking on the rocks at a spot I often check out. Flipping through the pages of my fish book, it was fairly easy to figure out what I’d been looking at. Since then, I’ve been looking out for them and have seen several, a case of knowing what to look for I think.
Lizardfish, like hawkfish, flounders and octopuses, are better spotted on the move before they settle and blend in. I saw this reef lizardfish just as it plunked into this spot and froze. As I drifted around above it, it remained motionless, waiting for me to go away. When I did so, I saw the lizardfish shoot off and hide on a different slab of rock.
Hualalai volcano has an elevation of 8,271 feet (2,521 m). Only the top of the volcano was poking through the clouds on a recent visit to the top of Mauna Kea.
This female Hawaiian garden spider (Argiope appensa) waits in the center of her web. I love her jewel-like appearance.
The grey crowned crane hails from eastern and southern Africa. It is decidedly not something seen everyday in Hawaii, unless you visit Pana‘ewa Rainforest Zoo & Gardens just outside Hilo. The zoo bills itself as the only natural rainforest zoo in the United States.
While I was there, this crane was getting in some serious preening.
For more information about Pana‘ewa Rainforest Zoo & Gardens, go to hilozoo.org.
Pololu beach looks like an inviting place to get in the water, especially if you get hot on the hike down. But it’s a very dangerous spot to get in the water with strong rip currents. Local knowledge helps, but even locals get into trouble now and again. One of those places that looks inviting, but only up to a point.
Orchids have a unique flower structure, which this Phalaenopsis orchid shows off.
They’re bilaterally symmetrical, the left and right halves being mirror images. The column in the center of the flower is a fusion of the male and female parts. They have three petals in an inner whorl and three sepals, usually as big as the petals, in an outer whorl.
The lower petal is the lip on which pollinators land. When the flower is in the budding stage, this lip starts out at the top. In most orchids, as the flower opens, it rotates until the lip is at the bottom, a process called resupination. Not all orchids do this. Some remain in the original upside down position and some rotate a full circle until they’re back where they started.
A worker checks out a turbine blade at Hawi Wind Farm. He looked like he was using the kind of tools one would use to patch a ding on a car, which seemed incongruous on such a large machine. But I suppose even small irregularities on the surface of the blade, especially the leading edge, could significantly affect the turbine’s efficiency.
Graham's Island 